It’s my plant of the summer, August 2013
It’s a red leaved banana, green leaves with red stems and herring bone veins, glossy, impossibly imposing, its central shoot scrolled into a beetroot spike before loosening into a funnel then relaxing into leaves beneath another shoot.
Everyone says how splendid, and then, when’s it going to flower? Which it won’t, it’ll be dead long before it has a chance to consider this. It’s enough that now, every day, it is here, revealing a fresh leaf and spike every few days. The sun shines through the leaves in late afternoon, making it...